Jenny Vaughan: Overturning injustice

All rapid responses

Rapid responses are electronic comments to the editor. They enable our users to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. A rapid response is first posted online. If you need the URL (web address) of an individual response, simply click on the response headline and copy the URL from the browser window. A proportion of responses will, after editing, be published online and in the print journal as letters, which are indexed in PubMed. Rapid responses are not indexed in PubMed and they are not journal articles. The BMJ reserves the right to remove responses which are being wilfully misrepresented as published articles.

Jenny Vaughan richly deserves the accolade bestowed on her for all the work she did in helping overturn my gross negligence manslaughter conviction, and continues to do to fight injustice in our profession. The NHS is a fine institution we are all proud to work for. However, it is troubling that others take the credit for its successes but those of us from ethnic minorities take the majority of the blame for its failures, as even the GMC acknowledges.(1) Jenny should be praised for working to eradicate racism in all its forms.

This has been a lot of work and Jenny and I acknowledge that she cannot have done it all by herself. We would like to thank our families and the many colleagues who contributed to this struggle, and in particular: my wife Catherine Sellu, Jenny’s husband Matt Dunckley, and friends Ian Franklin, John Vogel, Eric Watts, Miranda Harvie, Peter McDonald , Peter Taylor, Hemant Sheth, Abhay Chopada, David Melville and Roger Kirby.